Desire in Ambera Wellmann’s work takes shape as a surrender to the unknown. In this series of paintings, a woman is pleasured by an “other” whose form blurs, leaving only the trace of touch.
Ambera Wellmann lingers in a territory where intimacy becomes unknowable and strange, where the beast appears as a metaphor for desire’s unruly otherness.In these paintings, the figures are blurred, stripped of recognisable features, so that the boundary between self and the other collapses. Alterity is suspended; each body is as strange, as the flesh it touches. As she once remarked, “That quality of estrangement, of ‘I don’t know that to be my own but it is my own.’ Rejection and recognition in the same stroke.”
Across her career, Wellmann has pursued intimacy to its edges, turning explicit scenes into meditations on desire’s most unstable territories, where the erotic brushes the grotesque, humour grazes vulnerability, and the body becomes both dissolution and connection. Her practice extends beyond canvas, exploring works on wood panels and forms that verge on sculpture, giving her imagery a tactile, almost breathing presence. In later projects, she borrows titles from fragments of Sappho, framing each work as an incomplete utterance the viewer must cross to finish. Like the broken poetry, her figures slip from sight even as they invite touch, the lover becoming not a portrait but a shadow, an encounter with alterity itself.
‘(Wo)man and Beast in the Round of Their Need’ featured all the works in 2018
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